When Aristotle spoke of early tragedy as satyric, he probably had in mind that tragedy was at that stage improvisatory, antic, simple in plot, trochaic in meter, the adjective ‘‘satyric’’ referring to general mood and tone in much the same way as ‘‘tragic’’ could. One still encounters, however, the very different view that when he calls early tragedy ‘‘satyric’’ Aristotle means that those who performed it were costumed as satyrs. Lesky’s final statement on these matters (1983, 1-24, 407-12) sums up the prevailing scholarly consensus down to and beyond his time. For him as for many other Aristotelian fundamentalists (as one might call them) the philosopher’s satur-ikon must be an early form of satyr-play. The great virtue of Aristotle’s explanation, on this view, is that it accounts for ‘‘the close bond between the satyr-play and tragedy, which is generic and points to genetic connections’’ (Lesky 1983, 7).
There is an interesting divergence of analysis here. Skeptics conclude that ‘‘the satyric’’ is a retrojection into the dim past of the mood and tone of the developed form, satyr-play, of which knowledge was readily accessible. Fundamentalists are by contrast attracted by the power of ‘‘the satyric’’ to resolve the great conundrum of the association of satyr-play with tragedy: it was ever thus. The latter view requires one to assume that Aristotle somehow had reliable knowledge of the remotest, improvisatory stage of tragedy. The skeptic makes what is in itself the far more plausible assumption that Aristotle’s starting point was his knowledge of the developed form, which confronted him with the same conundrum. Those taking this approach may rest content with the evidence that satyr-play developed much later than tragedy. They may conclude that it was introduced to Athens by Pratinas or another and on the strength of its intrinsic appeal became a regular part of the dramatic competition, alongside tragedy, during the period preceding the introduction of comic competitions in 486. This skeptical position does not require us to explain away the clear evidence of the vases, as Pohlenz (1965) attempts to do with his lame suggestion that Pratinas was responsible only for a ‘‘Renaissance of the satyrs’’ (Lesky 1983, 10, who follows him).
To take Aristotle’s saturikon as an early form of satyr-play is only to displace the conundrum of the genre's association with tragedy into the past. Those taking this approach support it with the argument that tragedy, tragoidia, means the ‘‘song of the goats,’’ that is, of performers costumed as goat-like satyrs, a view dominant through most of the twentieth century (see Lesky 1983; Webster in Pickard-Cambridge 1962, 20, 96-98, 129) and still maintained by some scholars (for example, by Seaford 1994, 267-69 with nn. 147-48).
World History
